Teaching Statement - Betty H.C. Cheng

I have sought to provide an environment in the classroom that promotes
self-teaching and allows students to be creative. This style of
teaching is partly accomplished with question and discussion
opportunities during lectures. I have often received the comment that
this type of activity not only helps students to stay awake during
class but encourages them to learn and digest the material in order to
aid them in the discussions.

I discuss many real-life applications of theoretical concepts
described in class. Too often students fail to see the importance of
specific concepts when they are presented. Thus, in order to better
motivate the students, my experiences and experiences from others
relating to the application of concepts from programming languages
(CSE450,CSE452), analysis of algorithms (CSE330,CSE360), formal
approaches to software engineering (CSE470,CSE814) techniques are
discussed in the respective classes. I have found that real-world
experiences better explain why they have to learn material not only
from the class that I am teaching, but also from other classes that
they have taken (or are taking).

The Computer Science field is a very exciting area with literally new
technology being developed daily. While we are not able to give our
students the opportunity to work with every possible new software
package or computer, we, as faculty, should do our best to expose them
to representative examples and the foundations of these new
developments so that they are equipped with a ``toolkit'' of knowledge
that will enable them to make use of the new technology.

One thing that I try to do to further help students understand the
relevance of what they learn in the classroom and the real world is to
incorporate industrial projects into the Software Engineering class
(CSE470), as well as the capstone course. Students have found the
industrial projects to be extremely useful in obtaining a realistic
sense of the demands that they will face when they join the work
force. In addition, the group projects help the students to learn how to
leverage and synthesize different backgrounds and areas of expertise
in order to meet a common goal. Our customers have found it quite
useful to learn how current technology can be applied to their
respective projects. Customers have included Eaton Corporation, Motorola,
TCI Cable, Cargill, General Motors, and Siemens Automotive. We greatly
welcome other industrial organizations to participate in our
curriculum by sponsoring class projects.